


The Gangs of Ba Sing Se: an Introduction

by misura



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-10-16
Updated: 2009-10-16
Packaged: 2018-01-17 06:05:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1376605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misura/pseuds/misura
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fragments of a not-quite faerie tale, where Zuko might be leading a criminal gang and Aang might be more or less trying to apprehend him, but not very hard. (AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Gangs of Ba Sing Se: an Introduction

**Author's Note:**

> this odd and vaguely fic-shaped thingy came into existence at the prompting of a gangster!AU for this fandom, which this fic isn't, exactly, even if it's not really anything else, either.
> 
> it was a lot of thing to write, though, I do remember that much.
> 
> (posted and backdated March 2014)

Once upon a time, in the great city of Ba Sing Se, four Houses fell from grace - the House of Fire, the House of Water, the House of Earth and the House of Air. The city came to be ruled by a council, instead of by a king, and the council consisted of people that had been chosen to rule by everyone, rather than of people who'd simply been born to the right parents.

Naturally though, it wasn't possible to really let everyone vote. Besides, some people simply lacked the intelligence to entrust them with the responsibility of selecting a government. People in the Upper Ring were allowed to elect five members of the Council, people in the Middle Ring were allowed to elect two and people in the Lower Ring were allowed to elect none.

Members of the four fallen Houses settled mostly in the Middle Ring - over time, some of them managed to return to the Upper Ring as members of Families, while others failed to adapt and were moved to the Lower Ring, from which they rarely returned.

*

There's a term people in the Lower Ring use for the kind of fire that burns down buildings and it's this: _the Fire Lord's vengeance_. They don't use the term lightly, exactly - the Fire Lord is not, as a person from the Middle Ring might assume and someone from the Upper Ring would believe, some creature out of myth, hailing from the stories of ancient times when Avatars still walked the world.

His name is Zuko, and he lives in a building that used to be a shrine. It's said that anyone in the Lower Ring who commits a crime more than once is given the choice to either join the ranks of his gang or to be burnt to death. It's said he's richer than the two council members of the Middle Ring combined. It's said that the fire that killed his parents wasn't an accident, and it's said that any time a building burns down, it's his way of saying 'I told you you'd be sorry'.

At least one those rumors is false, but this aside.

*

Although Zuko's parents have both died in a fire, he still has two living relatives to whom he occasionally talks, one of whom runs a popular tea house in the Middle Ring, on the corner of 42nd and 56th street. During the past five years, the tea house has been closed six times by the Dai Li for 'cultural crimes', and an estimated total of one-hundred-and-four people have attempted to burn it down or blow it up or otherwise demolish the building, usually with its owner and sometimes with the owner's nephew still inside.

Forty-nine of them have been killed by Zuko personally, twenty-eight by members of his gang, and thirty-one by his sister, Azula, who intensely dislikes both tea and her uncle Iroh, but who feels it's simply poor manners to put up with someone interfering in family affairs. Four of them have vanished without a trace and are listed in the city's registry as 'presumed death'.

Nobody who's ever met Iroh could believe the man capable of harming someone, even in self-defense, so it's a matter of much speculation what may have happened to them. The most popular theory in the Lower Ring is that the four were Dai Li, and that someone in the Upper Ring has made sure that this fact would never become known by arranging their disappearances.

*

Very few people have said that Zuko's sister Azula is insane, but nearly everyone thinks so. It's the way she acts as if the world is her empire - and the way she reacts when people try to prove her wrong.

When she was thirteen years old, it's whispered (because you don't say Azula's name out loud, unless you're either one of her chosen companions or suicidal) she rode one of the abandoned railroads all the way to the Upper Ring and kidnapped the twelve-year-old daughter of a family that used to belong to the House of Fire. The girl's name nowadays is Mai, and it's said that the city's registry of the Upper Ring lists her as 'pronounced dead by her family'.

Azula's other chosen companion carries the name of Ty Lee and is said to be 'not from around here'. As far as the good folks from Ba Sing Se are concerned, that really says it all; they don't need to know anything more.

*  
four rumors about Azula:

\- Mai and Ty Lee are her lovers of long standing; their relationship is exclusive, but every now and then, a man may find himself in the right place at the right time (or the wrong place at the wrong time) and be invited to join in - to refuse means certain death; to accept means they'll give you a sporting chance.

\- Azula and Zuko used to be bitter rivals for the position Zuko now holds; for the moment, Azula has accepted her defeat, but anyone seeking to overthrow him would do well to seek her out.

\- the only reason she's kept Mai and Ty Lee by her side is because she hopes either of them will manage to seduce Zuko, thereby making sure the bloodline of the House of Fire will continue.

\- anything Zuko is too squeamish or too sentimental to do, Azula does for him, usually without asking him first; the one time Zuko asked her for something, it was to protect their uncle, and she refused.

*

Nearly everyone who lives in the Lower Ring is either an idiot or a cunning criminal, as far as those of the Upper Ring are concerned. This begs the rather obvious question who the criminals in the Lower Ring have got to steal from, given that there's no wealth to speak of in the Lower Ring.

The official answer is that it doesn't matter. Lower Ring petty criminals prey on other Lower Ring petty criminals, like the rabble that they are. The unofficial answer is that even with the Dai Li policing both the Upper Ring and the Middle Ring, crime has become too well-organized to keep it in check completely.

Although Fire is most notably involved, Earth, Air and Water have also found that it's more profitable to break the law than to obey it; thus, to some degree, a crime is not so much a crime as it is a strike against those who have usurped the places of the four Houses.

Shops and other businesses who openly support the Houses, or indicate they belonged to one, suffer from thefts and burglary remarkably less often than establishments owned by the Families - although, of course, the Dai Li inspects the former far more sternly and diligently than the latter.

*

There is only one member of a House who has been accepted into the Dai Li. He belongs to the House of Air and in spite of what one might expect, it's nearly only people who've never met him who dislike him merely for what he is.

Rumor has it he once tried to bring in the Fire Lord for questioning.

While some people say the fact that he's still alive proves the rumor to be false, others say it merely proves what a strange fellow he is - not _bad_ , mind you, just not quite like most people.

And then they'll tell you that he can _fly_.

*

Perhaps six years ago, there was a female member of the House of Earth named Toph, who lived in the Lower Ring whose family worked the land their ancestors had worked. During a particular dry summer, the house she and her family lived in caught fire.

Of the seven people who'd lived in the house, only Toph managed to get out in time. She wandered around the Lower Ring for a few weeks, but most people avoided her, as she was a survivor of 'the Fire Lord's vengeance' and people were afraid that helping her might offend the Fire Lord.

After having vanished for eight months, she walked into the Shrine of Fire and challenged Zuko to a duel for having killed her family.

He informed her he was not, in any way, responsible for what had happened to her family, given that he'd never even heard of them.

She replied that even if he hadn't set her family's house on fire, he hadn't done anything to _prevent_ it from happening, either. Or to put out the fire, once it had started.

It's not known what reply he made in return, but if you look carefully, you can still see the scorch-marks on the floors and the walls of the Shrine.

And from that day onwards, the Lower Ring had a fire-brigade and Zuko had a bodyguard.

She'd been blind from birth.

*  
three pointless questions Toph feels she's asking far too often:

\- "Are you stupid?" (the answer is invariably 'yes')

\- "Are you blind?" (the answer is invariably 'probably')

\- "Are you in love with Aang?" (once was too often, really - never might have been just enough)

*

The thing is (Toph thinks) that when people assume you're less able than they are just because you're blind, it's kind of insulting; she's got hands and feet and brains, after all - which is more than she can say of some other people she's met during the five years she's been hanging out with Zuko now.

It's also kind of insulting when people can clearly see you're blind, and yet still act as if they don't, either because they think it's more polite or because they're idiots, or both.

She spends a lot of time feeling wonderfully annoyed with people.

*

Zuko's not sure at which point the girl who wanted to kill him for something he didn't do became his girlfriend. (He does know when she became his bodyguard, although he'll be damned if he understands _why_ and his uncle's entirely too amused by the whole thing to talk to.)

He likes her, true enough - she's neither insane (like Azula), nor boring (like Mai) nor an airhead (like Ty Lee). Sometimes, she's very serious and sometimes, she can't seem to be bothered to take an interest.

She's never, ever going to need him or anyone else to take care of her.

*  
two people Zuko will protect at all costs (even if he knows they won't thank him for it):

\- Uncle Iroh, because he's old and foolish and the only person Zuko can really talk to without needing to worry about what he's saying.

\- Aang, because ... well, just because he _can_ , and Aang can just go and die if he's got a problem with that, except not really, because Zuko's decided that Aang dying isn't going to happen so there.

*

In the Dai Li, prestige is gained by numbers; justice is gauged by the number of pages in a report, the number of people arrested and convicted. A list is published monthly, and great importance is set on one's ranking.

Aang has been coming in last ever since he joined.

He doesn't care. He smiles a lot, and sometimes he does things that really can't be called anything else but 'stupid', even if the rules state that Dai Li of equal rank may never criticize one another. When chasing suspects, he trips over his own feet, or his shoelaces, or whatever is there to trip over, and sometimes he trips over nothing at all - he submits pitiful reports that barely span one page, and that only because he's illustrated them with drawings of a rather poor quality.

Simply put, he's a joke, only nobody's allowed to laugh.

It takes a while before the first time someone looks at the rankings and thinks that maybe, just maybe, it doesn't really matter all that much that she hasn't come in first, but it happens. The second she becomes aware of what she's thinking, she reminds herself of her duty to her family, and how her uncles are going to nag about her ranking, and she almost convinces herself she never thought it might not matter all that much.

*  
one thing Aang wonders almost every day:

"Why me?"


End file.
